Can women have it all?

Helen Gurley Brown in 1964 (photo by: Wikimedia Commons)

Have you ever wondered how women’s magazines were transformed from advice for housewives on how to best prepare pot roast into how-to manuals on the intricacies of the female orgasm? Womankind has Helen Gurley Brown to thank for that. Editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine from the early 1960s until the late 1990s, Brown is credited as the first person to introduce the concept of unmarried women having recreational sex (and enjoying it) to mainstream media (Fox). I offer this timeless advice of hers: “The vertical indentation in a man’s ear that dips down into the fleshy part of the lobe is an indication of how big his erect penis will be. Shallow ear-indentation corresponds to small penises; deeper (like the shape of Italy) go with larger. I haven’t been able to corroborate this theory recently but in my single days found it infallible” (Cosmopolitan). Or this tidbit: “There is nothing like holding off and not having an orgasm one week, two, more…to have the greatest orgasm of your life when it happens. This takes discipline. You have not to masturbate no matter how inclined you are….A really longed-for, ready-for-it, haven’t-in-a-while orgasm doesn’t have anything much better than it” (Cosmopolitan). She is also notable for another (albeit, less exciting) reason: her 1982 self-help-book-slash-memoir, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money Even If You’re Starting With Nothing, whose very title coined the term “having it all,” a phrase that has come to signal the career woman’s aspirational lifestyle that seamlessly interweaves motherhood and professional success. However, the origins of this phrase are less clear cut at second glance.

There is a prevailing idea that it was 1980s second-wave feminists who were the ones promising women they can and should aspire to mesh their professional goals and motherhood, and Brown’s book was just a product of the feminist-driven cultural wave encouraging women in this direction. But here’s the rub: Helen Gurley Brown did not have children. Her book Having It All mentioned children in only six of its 462 pages, and her overall feelings about working motherhood can be summed up as a sort of scoffing disbelief (Szalai). “Having it all,” at least as it pertains to working motherhood, was more of a marketing ploy than anything else, conjured up to promote the frenzied consumerism of the 1980s (Szalai). The phrase took on a life of its own completely separate from its origins, and I point out that it is interesting that “having it all,” despite its original omission of children, metamorphosed to encourage women to value their domestic roles as much as their public ones. As record numbers of women were entering the workforce in the early 1980s, their position in the private sphere was upended: “Three-fifths of the new jobs created in the United States from 1970 to 1984 went to women . . . in short, a male-breadwinning system, which had held for a majority of white as well as black married families, was collapsing” (Swinth 5, 6). Fears around the breakdown of the nuclear family meant that it became a given that for women, “having it all” must include reproducing. Advertisements targeted towards women started pushing the idea of becoming a “superwoman” as a new ideal; this meant having a high-powered career, but also being a domestic figure (“Housewife”). These fears surrounding women’s public roles are what shaped the myth that it was second-wave feminists who constructed the ideal that women must take it upon themselves to balance child rearing and a career; Kirsten Swinth writes that “the blame for women’s struggles falls squarely on the shoulders of feminism, full of false promises and promoting nothing more than the selfish advance of individual career women in the workplace” (10-11). But in fact, it was second-wave feminists who “fought for a world in which no woman faced the no-win choice to care for her family or remain dependent and relinquish her full economic and social citizenship” (Swinth 4). 

The peak of “having it all” rhetoric coincided with the implementation of 1980s neoliberal economic policy, which is centralized around the concept that privatization and free-market capitalism is essential to a functioning state. This neoliberalism is a large part of the reason why the idea that women can “have it all” has had such a long life. Catherine Rottenberg argues that neoliberalism spawned a new iteration of feminism, which she dubbed neoliberal feminism, that “is predominately concerned with instating a feminist subject who epitomizes ‘self-responsibility,’ and who no longer demands anything from the state or government” (“The Rise” 428). An assumption of the idea that women can have it all is that it is up to each individual woman to work hard enough and balance her time well enough to achieve the ideal of simultaneous parental and professional success. Gone are the cries for collective action to dissemble the patriarchal structures that inhibit women’s success; the idea that women can “have it all” hinges on the fact that these cries were heard, that these structures are a thing of the past. A new ideal of womanhood was spawned in this post-feminist fantasy, one that “interpellates a subject responsible for her own self-care . . . [who is] called upon to desire both professional success and personal fulfillment, which almost always translates into motherhood” (“The Rise” 428). Because the idea that women can “have it all” was constructed with a particular woman (white, middle-upper class, educated) in mind, “the impact of public policies such as paid parental leave, standard in other industrialized countries, on improving work conditions is glossed over, since most of the attention is focused on individual solutions” (Shafi 151). 

However, feminist scholars and normal women can agree that we do not, in fact, live in a post-feminist society. The new ideal of progressive womanhood, that the ultimate goal of “emancipated” women should be “crafting a felicitous balance . . . between norms of ‘intensive mothering’ and professional success,’” obscures the ultimate end goals of feminism (the most basic of which is equal rights for people regardless of gender) precisely because it is “predicated on the erasure or exclusion of the vast majority of women” (Rottenberg 158, 159). 

Class and race biases are apparent in the universal ideal of a happy work-family balance because most women do not have the financial means to choose between family and work in the first place. No amount of government subsidized daycare programs will change the fact that women on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder have a finite amount of hours in a day, and a majority of those hours must be spent working in order to afford to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their children. 

The idea that “having it all,” for women, must include a career and motherhood deserves evaluation. Rottenberg writes that “the entire notion of a felicitous work-family balance, in effect (and not surprisingly), reinscribes the desirability of having both a profession and meaningful career and a normative family” (162). It assumes that only certain choices (choosing to have a family and have a career) are able to make women happy. It also assumes that these things (working, becoming pregnant and keeping that pregnancy) are even choices to begin with. Wrapped up in both of these assumptions is the overarching idea that women should desire motherhood and a career. 

Works Cited: 

[1] Fox, Margalit. “Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave ‘Single Girl’ a Life in Full, Dies at 90.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 Aug. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/business/media/helen-gurley-brown-who-gave-cosmopolitan-its-purr-is-dead-at-90.html.

[2] “From Housewife to Superwoman: The Evolution of Advertising to Women.” Consuming Women Liberating Women Women and Advertising in the Mid 20th Century,  sites.duke.edu/womenandadvertising/exhibits/women-in-advertising/from-housewife-to-superwoman-the-evolution-of-advertising-to-women/. 

[3] “On the Anniversary of Helen Gurley Brown’s Death, 10 Sex Tips from the Legendary Editor.” Cosmopolitan, Cosmopolitan, 5 July 2022, www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a4671/ten-sex-tips-from-helen-gurley-brown/. 

[4] Rottenberg, Catherine. “Happiness and the Liberal Imagination: How Superwoman Became Balanced.” Feminist studies 40.1 (2014): 144–168. Web.

[5] Rottenberg, Catherine. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural studies (London, England) 28.3 (2014): 418–437. Web. 

​​[6] Shafi, Monika. “Caregiving, Work, and the Debate on ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.’” Women in German Yearbook 30 (2014): 149–163. Web.

[7] Swinth, Kirsten. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight : the Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018.

[8] Szalai, Jennifer. “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All’.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Jan. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-complicated-origins-of-having-it-all.html.